Big brains, saturated in a-historical Marxist revisioning and multicultural love of Islam, loathe the Crusades. This should indicate to the informed and objective that they were not only necessary, but also existential reactions against the Moslem Jihad which had every intention of destroying European Medieval civilization. Such a prospect salivates the yawning orifice of those who loathe the Church, and by extension their own superior civilization.
There is little doubt that the Crusades saved Europe in many ways, taking the endless war between Moslem barbarism and Western civilization into once Christian lands. They clearly indicate a superior society able to send men thousands of miles, better-armed, better-fed, better-led, with a noticeable advantage in technology and science. They also freed up trade routes, until the Ottoman Moslems once again shuttered the Mediterranean forcing Western navigators to find alternative routes around Africa, and across the Atlantic, to the entrepots of the East.
The Crusades have many fascinating threads and by-lines, one of which is Queen Melisende. Queens were common in Medieval Europe and the chess piece of the same name was the most powerful in the Medieval-created game of modern chess. Not so in Islam. There is not one single female ruler anywhere, at any time, in any state ruled by the destruction named Submission.
Sharon Newman writes the history of this astonishing woman in 'Defending the City of God'. A review here in the WSJ states:
“When Baldwin II died in 1131, Melisende and her husband, a crusader-count named Fulk of Anjou, were jointly crowned. A dozen years later, after Fulk had died in a riding accident, Melisende had her second double coronation at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, this time beside her 13-year-old son, Baldwin III. As long as her son remained a minor, the queen would exercise sole rule by hereditary right. A Cistercian abbot advised her: "On you alone the whole burden of the kingdom will rest. You must set your hand to great things and, though a woman, you must act as a man."
Ms. Newman marshals evidence to show that Melisende proved equal to the task. "It was her ambition," wrote the 12th-century chronicler William of Tyre, "to emulate the magnificence of the greatest and noblest princes and to show herself in no wise inferior to them."
Melisende, was an active Queen, comparable to any monarch in scope and ambition that Medieval Europe would create. Hers was a tenuous legacy – a small strip of land surrounded by Moslems – defended by an incredibly small army of well-armed, well-trained Knights and a few thousand professional soldiers.
“Melisende began by reconstituting her battered city. She built vaulted bazaars (still visible today), completed the restoration of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and endowed the conversion of the Al-Aqsa mosque into a palace. In consolidating the Latin church in Jerusalem, she cannily cultivated relationships with eastern Christian communities, like the Armenians and Greek Orthodox. And she oversaw the development of the Hospitallers and Templars, religious-military orders that joined monastic ideals to knightly chivalry.
Traveling her kingdom—from Tyre (in current-day Lebanon) to Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast—she dispensed royal favors, issued charters and concluded treaties. And at a time when Byzantine, Islamic and European artistic traditions began to commingle, she made herself a patron of the arts. One example of her patronage is the exquisitely illuminated Melisende Psalter—itself a blend of eastern and western styles—created at her scriptorium and today housed in the British Museum.”
Even given the rampant Medieval misogyny, Melisende is proof that women could not only rule, but acquire wealth, power and status in Medieval Europe. How different it was in Islam. Then, as today, women are considered as cattle and chattel in Muhammad's cult, itself a creation by men for the pleasures of men. Not a single woman of importance can be identified by Moslems and their big-brain Western allies, from any Moslem state, at any point in history. Not a single one. An encyclopedia is needed to catalogue a list of notable females from Medieval Europe. Here is a short list of Medieval Queens for example;